ON THE ROAD AGAIN...

Although all of you out there in the blogosphere probably aren’t going to notice (apart, perhaps, from noticing a decline in blog posts from mid-June to early August), this is what I’ll be up to over the next few months:

• April/May: selling one house in one province and buying a new house in another province;
  June/July: giving birth to our first baby:
• Two weeks after said baby is born: moving infant child, three pets, DH and some household goods to NOVA SCOTIA!
• That’s right! We’re moving EAST to Nova Scotia (told ya you’d be jealous, Renee). That is just ONE province shy of the real ‘home’, Newfoundland and Labrador. Believe it or not, though, it will still take two hours longer to drive to my parents house in Upper Gullies, Conception Bay South from Greenwood than it took us to drive from Cold Lake, Alberta (where we lived from 1996 – 1998) to Victoria, BC where DH’s parents live. Newfoundland is one crazy big island.

We are being posted to Greenwood, Nova Scotia in the beautiful Annapolis Valley. Although I likely visited that part of Nova Scotia as a child (Mudder? Fadder? Wanna answer that one for me?), the only time I remember visiting as an adult was in 1998. That was the year DH and I moved to Germany and we were selling our truck to my brother who was living in Halifax at the time (the one who lives in the UK now). Little Brother and I went on a bit of a holiday around Nova Scotia that fall and one of our stops was Greenwood. I wanted to stop into Greenwood to do a recce (‘recce’ is military speak for ‘reconnaissance mission’ when somebody goes in first to check out a situation). I’ve made it a practice to drive around any military bases I’m close to in case we end up getting posted there. It’s almost ten years later but the recce still paid off as I do remember this very pretty part of Nova Scotia.

So, if you sense a certain strained air in my posts from here on in, the above might give you a small indication of why…

Seeing as I really like the look of pictures on a post and I can’t very well take a picture of our posting message, here are a couple of ‘before’ pictures of our master bedroom, because we decided this was one of the ‘we have to…’ projects that had to be done before putting the house up for sale. This project is just one of, maybe, twenty projects on an ever increasing list. Unlike Yarn Harlot, I did not clean up the room before taking these pictures (well, not cleaned up apart from the fact that most of the furniture has been removed but that’s only because DH was faster than my camera finger). I rationalised this lack of attention to cleanliness detail by thinking that a messy room in ‘before’ pictures only makes the ‘after’ pictures that much more profound.

The following photograph is of the lovely big window in our bedroom that encouraged me to use a really dark green paint on the walls as the window provides enought light for the room not to appear too small (that window was one of the first big purchases we made in this, our first purchased home. Jeez, windows are expensive!):

The right side of the window. Note the 'almost shag' 20 year old original carpet. We are replacing the carpet with the same laminate flooring that we've used in our two guest bedroom and the basement renovations:

Ignore the laundry and move onto exploring the 'cheater ensuite' (meaning you can use that little door on the right, beyond the drafting table, to get to the main bathroom) and the 'walk in closet' (meaning you walk past them on the way to the bathroom):

Although you can't really tell from this picture,

the ceiling in the bedroom is spackled/stuccoed (is 'stuccoed' a word?). As in all of the other rooms we've renovated, with the exception of the hallway, DH has scraped the stucco off the ceiling. I don't like the stucco look from 20 years ago and there is NO way to keep it clean.

Renovation update: the carpet is gone, the ceiling has been scraped and sanded, the ceiling and walls were washed and primed, and DH already has coat one of Benjamin Moore's 'Guacamole' green on the walls!